In this thread I'll try to keep track of what goes on with the server hardware wise.

The last publicly documented server change was this: [completed] New server plans (These are no longer 'new' plans)
We upgraded the server to a 6-core/12-thread Intel Core i7 5820K CPU with 64GB of RAM.

Unfortunately that setup gave us trouble running VMWare ESXi which resulted in an unstable server. It took a few weeks to track down the exact cause. The problem was with the CPU. If you ever do any PC building: it's almost never the CPU that's causing stability issues. Unless you do overclocking. But that isn't the case here.

I decided to upgrade the CPU to a 14-core/28-thread Intel Xeon E5 2680 v4 CPU with 96GB RAM after that. This is what we are currently running all our servers on. That took care of the stability issues.

Then the next issue was with server performance. Or to be more precise: disk performance. The servers are running of two 7200 rpm SATA drives. And even though they are connected to an Areca 1680i raid controller with 4GB cache and a dual core 1.2GHz PowerPC cpu, it's not enough to run all the additional servers we're now running. It used to be:
  • website
  • email
  • Minecraft, 10 or so instances.

And now we added:
  • ARK Survival Evolved, 3 modded instances.

Disk I/O was lagging behind and that caused some noticeable performance issues.

So I purchased an Icy dock Tough Armor 4 x 2.5" mobile rack for 1 x 5.25" device bay. In this dock, I have placed three second hand 300GB 10K rpm SAS drives. These disks are meant to offset the disk I/O that's been hammering the OS drives. I also swapped out the four 80GB Intel Postville SSDs and replaced those with two new Samsung 850 Pro 256GB SSDs.

The additional drives worked well for a few weeks. Unfortunately this morning at around 5:02AM one of those three drives failed. This is not a big deal since they were running in raid-5. However it does mean I now have to move the virtual machines that were running on those drives back to the other disks they were on before. Which means we may experience some slow downs in the time to come.

The 10K rpm SAS drives were second hand with no warranty so the faulty drive will have to be replaced by buying another. We just had a beautiful baby girl and with all the stuff we need for that I'm not allowed (haha ) to spend more money on my hobby. So if anyone wants to help out by donating (see the front page). Those SAS drives cost about $55 each:
HP 300GB 6G SAS 10K 2.5 inch

At any rate the servers will continue to run. The ARK servers are running on two Samsung 850 PRO SSDs. It's just everything else that will get a performance hit now that they have to share the slower storage.